Process and Precedent: Chris Marker and AI art at King’s AI Festival
A screening of three AI remakes of Chris Marker’s La Jetée at King’s 2024 AI Festival provided a contextualisation of works using technology through the pioneering figure of Chris Marker as well as a reflexion on what it means to create an artistic AI image.
La Jetée is a lauded experimental science-fiction short film directed by Chris Marker in 1962 composed nearly exclusively of still images. The narrative is set in a post-apocalyptic Paris and explores themes of conflict, emotions, and memory through time travel. Through their diverse interpretations of Marker’s film, the three works shown at the King’s AI festival - AI Jetée (Adrian Goycoolea, 2024), The Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty) (Joanna Zylinska, 2021), Statistical Hallucination (Jorge Caballero, Anna Giralt Gris, 2023) - allow a better understanding of AI as a creative tool.
CHRIS MARKER AND DIGITAL MEDIA
Before diving into the three remakes of La Jetée it is worth taking a minute to gain a brief overview of Chris Marker’s practice. Marker is mainly known as an iconic figure of the French ‘Left Bank’ movement: a retroactively designated group that includes prominent filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais, contemporaries of the New Wave that distinguished themselves by their experimental approach to film and their left wing political views. Less known are his experimentations with digital technology.
As early as 1988 Chris Marker built his own chatbot, Dialector, in Applesoft BASIC, the programming language integrated in Apple II, Apple’s first widely available personal computer. The chatbot, which was restored and made available online in 2014, has 700 sentences stored and ready to deploy in response to the user’s statements and interrogations. Especially to the modern user accustomed to Chat-GPT, the exchange isn’t always very fluid, but certain keywords (try ‘cat’ or ‘owl’) are sure to generate an enthusiastic response. The small dataset compiled by Marker creates repetitions and discrepancies, giving the impression of chatting with a slightly senile, very existential, cat-loving machine. But it’s precisely the intimate scale that Dialector operates on that allows us to feel the connection between the object and its maker: the machine’s “personality” betraying the artist’s hand.
Screenshot from Mia’s conversation with Agnes de Cayeux, Andrew Lozano and Annick Rivoire’s 2014 digitalised version of Chris Marker’s 1988 Dialector 6
Two years later, Dialector was shown as part of the large interactive multimedia installation Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television (1990) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In Zapping Zone Marker exploded his usual medium of film into a dozen screens and interactive elements. The viewer never experiences a single linear narrative but rather encounters a variety of fragments of film, images, and computer programs, analogous to the construction of memory and the ‘flow’ of media as theorised by cultural theorist Raymond Williams. Between then and now the constant flow of media has become so commonplace that what strikes us when viewing Zapping Zone today is less the amount of digital content than the monumentality of the hardware.
Chris Marker, Zapping Zone, 1990, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Fast forward to the internet age, Marker and his friend Max Moswitzer created l’Ouvroir in 2008, an online museum set in the virtual world (or metaverse) ‘Second Life’. In what seems like worlds away from the Left Bank movement, the artist kept strengthening his reflexion around the nonlinearity and artificiality of memory. The interactive work builds on Marker’s exploration of images, memory, and technology through a playful fantasy archive of the artist’s oeuvre set in an evolutive net-based environment. At a time where metaverse rhymes more with increased privatisation of digital space, l’Ouvroir stands as testimony to the utopian open-access ideals that pervaded the web in the noughties.
AI REMAKES OF LA JETEE
Contemporary artists working with AI today still often struggle to find a secure foothold within the mainstream art world. A figure like Chris Marker, canonised by art history and institutional recognition, provides a helpful precedent for the exploration of new technologies as a legitimate artistic medium. In remaking La Jetée, Adrian Goycoolea, Joanna Zylinska, Jorge Caballero and Anna Giralt Gris not only build on the film’s relevant themes, but also pay tribute to Chris Marker as a pioneering figure in new media art. Additionally, the three films’ diverse use of AI help us understand the different ways that AI, specifically large language models, can be used for creative purposes, including through prompting and the creation or manipulation of datasets.
Adrian Goycoolea's work, AI Jetée, is a frame by frame remake of La Jetée. As Goycoolea attempts to create images identical to the original film, what stands out are the differences. In the AI version for instance, the mask from the time traveling device becomes sunglasses and the character’s makeshift cot transforms into a hammock. This interpretation shows AI’s predisposition to seek out patterns: someone lounging in a hammock is a more recognisable motif than a political prisoner getting their memories harvested in a post-apocalyptic bunker. Despite their differences, the similarity between the images is still striking and calls to our attention the artist’s skill in the precision of his prompts, recalling the age-old exercise of ekphrasis.
Still from Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962 / Still from Adrian Goycoolea, AI Jetée, 2024
On the other hand, in Joanna Zylinska’s The Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty) the frames are unrecognisable. To create her film, Zylinska trained a GAN (Generative Adversial Network) on stills from La Jetée, yet the resulting stills only share their texture with Marker’s images. The artist can scramble and reinterpret meaning by taking the dataset as starting point and deconstructing it through the machine. Her visuals are filled with ambiguous gender fluid creatures and eyes in unexpected places created by the neural network’s apophenic gaze. By adapting Marker’s story and re-situating it within this fantastical universe, Zylinska interrogates dominant male-centered mythological narratives and uses the imperfections of AI as an open-ended space of questioning. Created in 2021, the images also already appear slightly dated compared to what Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can achieve in 2024, thus recording the speed at which the technology is evolving.
Still from Joanna Zylinska, The Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty, 2021)
Finally, Jorge Caballero and Anna Giralt Gris’s Statistical Hallucination takes the more straightforward approach by feeding La Jetée’s text to a neural network and assembling the outcome into a short-film. A comical gap takes place as Chris Marker’s original text filled with poetry and metaphor is interpreted literally by the AI and turned into a set of nonsensical images.
Still from Jorge Caballero and Anna Giralt Gris, Statistical Hallucination, 2023
Seeing all these works side by side and in relation to Chris Marker’s practice allows us to better understand how the use of AI as an artistic medium fits within a lineage of critical explorations of technology, and how the artist’s direction influences the outcome and the meaning of the final work. As AI becomes increasingly present in our everyday lives we should let artists continue to misuse, reimagine, analyse, and criticise it.
About the Author
Mia Stern is a French-American writer and curator based in London. She is particularly interested in contemporary art and new technologies, a topic she has written and spoken about extensively through her experiences at the Centre Pompidou, Taschen, and in the artist studios of Gretchen Andrew and Libby Heaney.
